Bon Apétite
“Being tall is an advantage, especially in business. People will always remember you. And if you’re in a crowd, you’ll always have some clean air to breathe.”
And the public does remember the humor and the dynamic personality of the six-foot, two-inch woman named Julia Child.
Sadly, the TV chef left us in August 2004, but her influence continues in numerous cookbooks, food videos and soon-to-be released motion picture, Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep.
At the oldest restaurant in the country of France, Paul Child introduced his new wife to French cuisine with a meal of oysters, sole meuniere and fine wine. Having been raised on hearty New England fare, Julia characterized the dining experience as, “an opening up of the soul and the spirit for me.”
The newly weds both worked for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) when they met. At first, these two contradictory individuals cared little for each other.
Ten years older than Julia McWilliams, Paul Child, an artist and poet with a black belt in judo, spoke flawless French. Before the OSS posting, the adventure-starved young woman worked as an advertising copywriter for a New York upscale furniture business, W & J Sloane.
In a letter to twin brother Charlie, Paul, a world traveler, described Julia as “wildly emotional” and an “extremely sloppy thinker” who couldn’t “sustain ideas for long”.
On the other hand, Julia despaired of Paul’s, “light hair which is not on top, an unbecoming blond mustache and a long, unbecoming nose”. After a cross-country trip, livened up with 8 bottles of whiskey and 1 bottle each of gin and mixed martinis, the couple wed the following September, 1946.
With Paul’s assignment to France, his new wife’s education in the art of fine food began in earnest. “I was hooked,” she remarked and soon enrolled in the Cordon Bleu, the esteemed cooking school which has produced Food Network chefs, Giada De Laurentis, Mario Batali and Sandra Lee.
Along with six months of instruction and private lessons with Master Chef, Max Bugnard, the budding gourmet haunted the open-air street markets gleaning food lore from fish mongers, bakers and sellers of fruit.
Not to be left out of the adventure, Paul squired Julia to neighborhood bistros as well as fine restaurants further increasing her knowledge of well-prepared food and its presentation on the plate.
A collaboration with two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, over a period of ten years, produced Mastering the Art of French Cooking, volume 1. During this time, the Childs were posted throughout Europe and then back to Washington making communication between the three colleagues difficult in those days before e-mail and fax.
Detailed reports of individual recipes, each page typed with six carbon copies, flew back and forth across the continent and the Atlantic throughout the 50s. Exhausted at one point from the exacting experience of perfecting one-ingredient recipes, Julia exclaimed, “I’ve just poached two more eggs and thrown them down the toilet”.
Clearly, she couldn’t stomach another Salad Layonnaise, a traditional French salad of curly endive, hot bacon, and a freshly poached egg.
After testing all those recipes, volume 1 was rejected by several publishers for being too much like an encyclopedia. Weighing in at 734 pages, they weren’t too far from wrong. But persistence paid off with publicity from The French Chef on WGBH, Boston’s public TV station, the cookbook sold 200,000 copies by 1965.
Imagine those housewives of the early 60s who regularly stocked their pantry shelves with Shake ‘n’ Bake, Reddi Whip and Tang reaching for whisks, molds and copper bowls to produce quiche Lorraine, boeuf bourguignon and reine de saba. Quite a change and all because of a former advertising copywriter.
Recovering from a full radical mastectomy in 1968, Julia dried her tears and threw all her energies into completing volume 2 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “Rushing from stove to typewriter like a mad hen,” she quipped.
Success from more episodes of The French Chef catapulted Julia from cook to a celebrity. But Paul’s declining health took away his French and verbal fluency. From then on, he served as manager, photographer, recipe tester and proofreader leaving the limelight to his adored wife.
Consequently, Julia’s 40-year career devoted to fine food, yielded an induction into the Culinary Institute of Fame (1993), France’s Legion of Honor (2000) and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom(2003). In August 2002, The French Chef’s kitchen was welcomed into the Smithsonian National Museum as an exhibit.
Besides being recognized with honorary degrees from various universities , the distinctive voice and manner of Julia Child have been parodied on SNL (Saturday Night Live) by Dan Aykroyd, by Heathcliff Huxtable on The Bill Cosby Show (1984-1992) and on Garrison Keillor’s radio series, A Prairie Home Companion, by Tim Russell.
During her 90 plus years, this restless young woman from Pasadena, California, who once cooked up shark repellent for the U.S. Navy during WWII, grew into an iconic figure synonymous with fine dining in the kitchens across America.
